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The US will invest more than $3 billion to advance the development of antiviral pills for COVID-19 and other pathogens to prepare for future pandemics, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday. The nation’s top infectious disease expert announced the $3.2 billion investment as part of a new “antiviral program for pandemics” to develop drugs to address symptoms caused by potentially dangerous viruses. “It’s a whole-of-government effort aimed at developing the next generation of COVID-19 treatments, as well as preparing us for future threats,” Fauci said at the White House’s coronavirus press briefing.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is urging Americans not to see their loved ones for the holidays, warning that celebrations “cannot be business as usual this Christmas.” In an interview with the Washington Post this week, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases explained that he will, personally, duplicate the protocols he followed on Thanksgiving, avoiding private gatherings with his family and spending Christmas solely with his wife.

Fiscal Sanity: Which political party is better at managing taxpayer dollars? The latest ranking of states' fiscal condition offers an unequivocal answer. For several years, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University has ranked states based on five measures of their financial condition: cash solvency, budget solvency, the ability to meet long-term spending commitments, state spending and taxes as a share of personal income, and unfunded pension liabilities and debt. And lest anything think that Mercatus — a free-market-oriented group — is fudging the numbers, note that the data used to compile these rankings all come from official state annual...

Germany's government expects to spend around 93.6 billion euros by the end of 2020 on costs related to the refugee crisis, a magazine said on Saturday, citing a draft from the federal finance ministry for negotiations with the country's 16 states. The figure is likely to stoke concerns, particularly among growing anti-immigration movements, on the impact of new arrivals on Europe's largest economy which took in more than a million people last year, many from Syria and other war zones. The numbers arriving have fallen this year, helped by a deal between the European Union and Turkey that was designed...

Polls regularly show that investor Warren Buffett is one of the most trusted men in America. What a crock. The man is an imposter, a four-flusher and a humbug. And I can prove it. If you’re skeptical, maybe that’s because - like mushrooms - you’ve been kept in the dark and fed a lot of horse manure. Too many people believe what they hear in the mainstream media. They listen to the lying politicians - that’s 98% of them - in both parties. And they swallow a lot of nonsense from self-styled investment “experts.” (I’ll have a lot more to...

(CNSNews.com) - The portion of the federal debt that is subject to a legal limit set by Congress closed Thursday, June 11, at $18,112,975,000,000, according to the latest Daily Treasury Statement, which was published at 4:00 p.m. on Friday. That, according to the Treasury's statements, makes 90 straight days the debt subject to the limit has been frozen at $18,112,975,000,000. $18,112,975,000,000 is about $25 million below the current legal debt limit of $18,113,000,080,959.35.

While the cancellation of 'The Interview' wiped billions off the US Box Office take in 2014 (), ticket sales in North America will total roughly $10.5 billion, according to The NY Times, the lowest since 2000 (after inflation). Regal Cinemas and AMX Theatres have seen profits collapse and Carmike Cinemas has plunged to a loss as major movie delays (from Pixar and Universal), "pirating" of several movies (The Expendables 3 and Annie) before their release, and studios suffering one dud after another (Warner Bros.) the 4% YoY decline - for what is ultimately an affordable luxury - suggests the gas-price-savings...

DFLers, who generally frown on grandeur as part of their ideology, are going to build themselves a marvelous new office building. They have been deaf to the idea that it is wasteful and that there are countless ways to accommodate the few of them who are going to be displaced by renovation work on the Capitol. To save a few bucks -- cutting it from $94 million to $77 million -- they claim they are going to eliminate an adjoining parking ramp. But that was to have been principally for the public anyway, and the public has been ignored in...

Vice President Biden rolled into Milford, Ohio, Sunday,September 9, to speak at public Milford High School to a crowd of about 200 Democrats in the school cafeteria. The TEA PARTY was there to meet him, and his followers.

I, I'm so in debt with you, Whatever you want to do, Is all taxed by me, 'Cause you make me feel so amused. I want to treat my wife on you. It seems the First, um, Lady, Since we've been together, We've been in debt forever, On a spending spreeeeeeeee. Y'all are the ones I keep running toooooo. You'll never be unscrewwwwwed. First Lady, let's, let's spend together, Taxing them whenever, whenever, Markets are good or bad, In the black, in the red. Ooooooooooooooooooooooh, Yaaaaaaaaah. Whenever markets are good or bad, In the black, in the red. Why, Mitt...

Democrats say they can replace more than $1 billion in Gov. Jerry Brown’s cuts to programs for the poor. All they have to do is spend some of the state’s reserve and make a few accounting changes. Doesn’t this sound eerily familiar? California state government has taxed and spent itself into successive budget deficits and then covered over the mess by snatching money from one pot to spill into another. This latest fix sounds like more of the same. And what could go wrong? ...

Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday unveiled his revised budget for the coming fiscal year with twin pleas. He pleaded poverty and pleaded with voters to approve more taxes on the November ballot. Both pleas are curious. . .

President Barack Obama visited Val and Paul Keller on Friday. They owe $168,000 on their mortgage. Their home is currently valued at $100,000. Obama forgot to mention something. At the peak of the market in 2007, the Keller's did a $250,000 cash-out refinance! Now they want Obama's help.

Democrats say that the angry, anti-austerity elections this week that saw voters throw out reform-minded French and Greek leaders could be good news for them, a signal that their plan to spend billions more than the Republicans is a vote winner. Those elections “confirm the position that many of us have taken, which is the most important thing right now is to sustain and nurture the very fragile economy,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., the ranking member of the House Budget Committee. “While we have to develop and implement a long-term deficit reduction plan, we should be very careful...

The Treasury on Tuesday started dipping into federal pension funds in order to give the Obama administration more credit to pay government bills. "I will be unable to invest fully" the federal employees retirement system fund beginning Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in a letter to Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress. The House of Representatives is expected to vote on Wednesday on the Obama administration's request to raise the country's legal debt limit to $16.394 trillion.

GRIDLOCK in Congress implies that there won’t be any collective decision to spend more as a nation to get out of our slump. Increases in deficit spending seem unlikely, and so does the balanced-budget stimulus I’ve been advocating in this column. For now, we must pin our hopes for a robust recovery on the willingness of millions of consumers to spend substantially more. But what really drives consumer spending? Economists are reasonably good at divining how consumers tend to react to changes in government policy, but in the absence of such policy, and when the economy is in the doldrums,...

WASHINGTON -Doubling down on his economic agenda, President Barack Obama on Saturday kept up his appeal for public support of his $447 billion proposal to boost jobs and consumer spending, calling on Americans to press Congress to pass the legislation. In his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama reiterated a message that has become a central focus of his presidency amid stubbornly high unemployment numbers and dipping approval over his handling of the economy. The president announced his jobs legislation to a joint session of Congress last week and has since gone outside Washington to build a case for its...

In Wisconsin, six Republican state senators face recalls on Tuesday. And outside groups have sent enormous sums of money into the state in preparation. Local races rarely receive this much attention or this much out-of-state funding, but both liberal and conservative advocacy groups have decided there’s enough at stake to prompt a tidal wave of outside support. ABC News reports that non-Wisconsin organizations have poured $25 million into the races so far. That figure came from the nonpartisan Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which estimates that candidates

Federal Borrowing on Pace to Hit Debt Limit in Less Than Week Wednesday, April 20, 2011 By Terence P. Jeffrey (CNSNews.com) - Federal borrowing is on pace to hit the legal limit on the national debt in less than a week. As set in a law passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama on Feb. 12, 2010, the legal limit on the national debt is $14.2940 trillion. As of the close of business Tuesday, according to the Daily Treasury Statement released at 4:00 pm today, the portion of the national debt subject to this legal limit was $...

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama suggested freezing spending on a small fraction of the federal budget and making a few cuts. But, as the National Taxpayers' Union calculated, the plan actually would add a net $21 billion in spending. And that's before the unknown costs of seven other major State of the Union proposals whose price tags aren't immediately obvious. The president can't disguise spending by calling it "investing." Americans recognize that when government "invests" what really happens is that taxpayers' money is spent. . . .